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Rumblings xtra: Items that didn't make print edition

By: Bob Hunter

The Columbus Dispatch - April 04, 2014 09:49 AM

This is the 15th anniversary of the last regular season game for the Columbus
Chill at the Fairgrounds Coliseum, a 5-0 win over Dayton, and former Crew president David Paitson
and former Dispatch beat writer Craig Merz have been asking fans on their Chill Memories Facebook
page to wear their Chill jerseys to the Blue Jackets’ game with Chicago.

Merz and Paitson have been working on a book on the
Chill and just signed a deal with Skyhorse Publisher -- http://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/ -- which
plans to bring the book out early in 2015.

That last game, played on Easter Sunday, 1999, drew the
team’s 191st sellout and enabled the Chill to win the East Coast Hockey League’s Northwest
Division.

Iowa went $194,375 over its budget for its Outback Bowl trip to Tampa, according
to the Iowa Press-Citizen. Documents released by the university this week showed that Iowa
spent $2,019,375 on the trip, which ended in a 21-14 loss to Louisiana State University. The school
had been provided a $1,825,000 budget by the Big Ten.

Mick Walker, the UI Athletics Department’s chief
financial officer, said the cost of a charter aircraft was the main reason Iowa went over budget,
along with a substantial increase in expenses for complimentary tickets and ground transportation.
He added that as a self-sustaining unit of the university, the UI Athletics Department will balance
its bowl game budget with revenue from its annual operations.

The athletic department spent $747,288 on a charter
airplane to fly the football team, coaches, support staff, families, the official university
elegation and the Hawkeye Marching Band to and from Tampa. That was $221,437 more than what it cost
to fly the same groups to and from Tempe, Ariz., for the 2011 Insight Bowl.

With the University of Massachusetts leaving the Mid-American Conference after
2015 football season, the American Athletic Conference is presumed to the school’s preferred
destination. But the commissioner of the AAC, formed in the summer of 2013 as a combination of
mostly football playing schools from the former Big East and Conference USA (such as Cincinnati and
Memphis), told the Daily Hampshire Gazette that expansion isn’t on the league’s agenda at this
point.

“We have a lot of respect for UMass. It’s a flagship
university, a high quality northeast presence. UMass has a lot of things going for it,” AAC
commissioner Mike Aresco said. “We don’t have any plans to expand.”